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Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

ourworldindata.org

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Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#91

Post by taneq »

grecy wrote: post #82
retrac wrote: post #25

Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away. About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020. Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers. Context is needed. Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So p…

Yup, I was Justin the town that has the worlds largest shipping port by tonnage, all of it iron ore. I bet you’ll never guess - you’ve never heard of it. The city and surrounds makes Mordor look nice.

Port Hedland?

Edit: Wow, Hedland is half of that, I was mainly thinking of the Mordor bit.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#92

Post by whiddershins »

retrac wrote: post #25

Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away. About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020. Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers. Context is needed. Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So p…

I think Ray Kurzweil talking about future shock in the late 90s provides a descriptive, if not satisfying, explanation.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#93

Post by nonrandomstring »

deathanatos wrote: post #21
gtvwill wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the matrix. Agent smith said it so well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgS1Lwr8gq8

Or perhaps Agent Smith mistook an S-curve that hasn't started to level off yet for unfettered exponential growth. > Generally, developed nations have seen a decline in their growth rates in recent decades ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Population_g... ) Or perhaps he was just evil and had a hatred of humanity that he was justifying with whatever reason pleased him.

> Or perhaps he was just evil and had a hatred of humanity that he was justifying with whatever reason pleased him.

For me. Agent Smith isn't coded as evil. He represents the cold rationality of the scientific algorithm - "I've been studying your species...". He's simply curious. It would never occur to Smith to "justify" anything, even to simulate pleasure. Smith represents what Kant called the limits of pure reason - the ability to measure, compute and model everything, but understand nothing.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#94

Post by rcarr »

dqv wrote: post #77
rcarr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One day, whilst eating a burger in a pub and thinking about the food chain, I ran a thought experiment in my head. I imagined being hungry and someone offering me a choice between a ham sandwich or a vegan sandwich. I could only select the ham sandwich if I was willing to shoot a pig in the head. I wouldn’t have to butcher the pig or anything else, just be responsible for its death. I decided that I would choose the…

>There is just too much social resistance to overcome. We're really only on the second wave of veganism right now. I can't say exactly when the first wave "ended", but I'd say the second wave started to roll in after 2010. But in this second wave, there is a lot of culture being developed that I believe will sustain a third wave. Whereas the first wave had a bunch of early adopters who had very odd food habits (i.e.…

I honestly think this is going to have the opposite effect of what you think it will. People outside of metropolitan areas are sick to death of “new traditions and practices” and “high profile” names. They see it as another bourgeoisie vs proletariat battleground.

They do not want “new food culture” they want the existing culture but more environmentally friendly. You aren’t going to pry the burgers out of their hands no matter how good your beyond burger is. But if you make a petri dish burger that tastes better than a dead cow you might stand a chance of them getting behind it.

You can say the younger generation doesn’t care about old traditions but people have been saying this throughout time. Young people have a habit of growing old and more conservative when they gain more life experience and realise that the traditions they rallied against in the youth were actually developed for a good reason.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#95

Post by timeon »

freedude wrote: post #56
docmechanic wrote: post #2

This statistic always takes the top of my head right off: "The dominance of humans today is clear: us and our livestock account for 96% of global mammal biomass. Wild land mammals make up just 2%." If you, like me, wondered about poultry ... "Here we focus on mammal populations, so neither wild birds or poultry are included. But for birds the story is similar: our poultry biomass is more than twice that of wild birds…

Good point about birds. Add them to amphibians, fish and insects and it would make this look less impressive.

Less impressive? Do you think there is no significant loss of biodiversity?

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#96

Post by keithnz »

himinlomax wrote: post #41
giantg2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production." The real questions are: Does that include recycling? If not, how do we see this being sustainable?

It can be sustainable with electrolytic furnaces powered by carbon-free energy.

I was looking at what the future of steel might look like recently, I think this is quite interesting https://www.hybritdevelopment.se/en/

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#97

Post by adamrezich »

agalunar wrote: post #83
adamrezich wrote: post #29

I can't be the only one who is extremely tired of these semi-frequent utterly nihilistic "I'm sad to be part of the human species, we're killing the planet" posts and comments, especially when the posts themselves are possibly misleading (whales aren't included? come on ). I don't know about you but I'm quite happy to be alive and reasonably healthy, and I hope to have many children, I hope mankind doesn't go extinct…

> I don't know about you but I'm quite happy to be alive and reasonably healthy I think the important thing to contemplate is that this might be at the expense of other people, living or yet to be born. Not that we've done anything wrong – just that the circumstances that make this possible for us might preclude it for others. > nihilistic platitudes like "how is there still an ecosystem?" are completely baffling to…

> I think the important thing to contemplate is that [being happy to be alive and reasonably healthy] might be at the expense of other people, living or yet to be born. Not that we've done anything wrong – just that the circumstances that make this possible for us might preclude it for others

this is called the natural order of things. nature is competition. this is all self-evident. all of our ancestors innately understood this. what exactly has made us forget it? again, the only thing I can think of is sheer societal decadence, being so far removed from nature that we only have an abstract concept of it.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#98

Post by patrec »

retrac wrote: post #25

Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away. About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020. Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers. Context is needed. Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So p…

So modern civilization currently requires the average human to consume roughly 3-4 times his body weight in steel per year. And given that steel production has roughly doubled in the last 20 years, this will probably still go up a fair deal.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#99

Post by myshpa »

cmpb wrote: post #85
myshpa wrote: post #59

The sad thing is that 100 years ago humans and livestock accounted for around 5% of the biomass (all zoomass, not land mammals only), 95% being the wildlife. Now the numbers are reversed. We've stolen the land from the wildlife and dedicated it to a few species we consider edible (agriland is more than forests now, and 75% of it for animal agriculture). Is anybody surprised that we're living in the anthropocene, defi…

The article indicates that the bulk of the extinction of large mammals happened during the Quaternary Extinction[1], between 52kya and 9kya, so 100 years ago the damage was already done. It also makes the argument that the extinction events in each region coincided with the arrival of humans to that region, which would imply that these extinctions were not due to climatic changes. I don't mean to imply that we're doi…

100.000 years ago ... 20 mil. tonnes of carbon

10.000 years ago ... 15 mil. tonnes of carbon

100 years ago ... 10 mil. tonnes of carbon

now ... 3 mil. tonnes of carbon

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/04/Decline-of-wild-m...

First 5 mil. tonnes took 90.000 year. Next 5 mil. 9.900 years. Next 7 mil. 100 years. 3 mil. remain, most of the megafauna is already gone.

If we continue this trend, in 30 years there'll be only mice, mosquitos, and medusas. And farm animals, of course.

We have to switch to plant-based diets. Now. There is no other way. No time to wait for technological breakthroughs.

Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

#100

Post by nly »

retrac wrote: post #25

Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away. About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020. Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers. Context is needed. Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So p…

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is man’s inability to understand the exponential function."
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